I can’t smoke pot anymore because I think my kids are dwarves. So I do it at the movies! This week: the first in Peter Jackson’s new Middle-Earth trilogy, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.

So here’s a thing: I did a little thinking in line and realized that I saw my first Peter Jackson movie almost twenty years ago, in 1993. There was (and is) this awesome video store in Seattle called Scarecrow Video and they stocked a ton of weird import stuff and they had Dead Alive (aka Braindead) and I rented it. If you’re too young to remember this, before Jackson was the fantasy world’s greatest filmmaking treasure he was a dude who made insanely gory f-d up movies. Some of them even had puppets in it.

So I was a fan early. I even liked his sort of crappy Hollywood cash-in movie The Frighteners. So when he was tapped to do the first Lord Of The Rings trilogy, I thought “Oh, cool. Dude’s gonna make some cash and then go back to making f-d up gory movies.”

Obviously that didn’t happen. Instead we got King Kong and The Lovely Bones before money brought him back to Middle-Earth to make three more Goddamn movies about elves and dwarves and hobbits and wizards.

No offense intended – I’m perfectly cool with elves and dwarves and hobbits and wizards. They’re fine. But do we really need three more movies about them? I read these books when I was a kid and they live in my brain just fine. This movie just seems – I dunno, not very necessary. It’s painfully long (two hours and some-odd minutes) and nobody seems to be having any fun. The movie takes 45 minutes to even leave Bilbo’s house. Even I don’t take that long to get out of the house.

There are some good bits. Remember Gollum? He’s in this one too and he owns. Once the crew finally get on their way and start their big adventure to pilfer the treasure of the dragon Smaug things are a little easier to deal with. There’s a cool scene where they escape from the goblins that works. But Peter Jackson’s just so in love with this world that he doesn’t think that maybe the movie needs something else besides endless scenes of people with beards having Important Discussions.

Oh, and this is also the first movie shot and projected in 48FPS high-definition. I hated it. It made my head hurt and eyes get sore. Normally when I’m watching a movie high I can sort of lean back and just drink everything in but everything is so sharp and moves so fast that it kind of put me on a bad trip just for being what it was. Not recommended.

Disclaimer: I fixed all the typos and grammar mistakes but left everything else in.

About K. Thor Jensen...
K. Thor Jensen is an award-winning writer and graphic novelist who lives on a tiny island in the middle of nowhere. His website is Shortandhappy.com. He fought six Draculas and won.